[Bill Blisset reminiscences in Seventy Years With David Jones in the Spring 2010 edition of Flashpoint Magazine - http://www.flashpointmag.com/]

The woes of the Church came up again. It had seemed bad enough years ago when the Caldey Benedictines were dispersed over some scandal (completely unsuspected by DJ), but now! The enemy seems to have taken all the places of power. There was some old bishop who said recently, about the liturgical upheaval, that he had been waiting all his life for it. ‘The bloody old hypocrite! All these years our acts of worship were nothing but play-acting, mummery, bowing and scraping.’ He continued: ‘I was talking about this to a priest a few months ago. I said, you fall in love with a girl, visit her often, kiss her, tell her many times and in many ways that you love her; then you visit her less and less often, give her an occasional peck, tell her that she has your esteem. “What has that to do with it?” asked the priest. It has everything to do with it: it means that what you do in religion, as in love, is the sign of what you are.’

David usually goes to the half-past eight Mass as being the least deformed, but two Sundays ago he had gone to the eleven o’clock, on the Feast of the Transfiguration, and it consisted of the priest poking around with bits of paper until suddenly the words of Consecration were spoken. ‘And then he had the cheek, in the middle of these blasphemies, to preach a bloody sermon on the meaning of the Transfiguration!’

This was vehemently spoken, then David signed and said, ‘Why must all experiments in liturgy be compulsory? Why must they replace the Mass that was known and loved and set up an unbridgeable discontinuity? Why must every one of the new experiments be so thin and truncated and incapable of making any lasting impression?’

He remembers years ago seeing Dom Gregory Dix, whose Shape of the Liturgy he thinks a great work of the spirit. There was some sort of Anglo-Catholic Congress, and a very ancient liturgy was to be celebrated. John Betjeman couldn’t use his ticket, and so David went with Penelope, hoping he wouldn’t be exposed and expelled. He remembers, as I do, Dom Gregory’s stillness and concentration; they did not meet then or ever.

Rather to my surprise, DJ disclosed that he knew the books of both Frazer and Jessie L. Weston before he knew or had heard of The Waste Land.[2] He met T.S. Eliot in the later ?20s when he came to know some literary people, and discovered the poetry of Eliot and Hopkins concurrently. The full, not the abridged Frazer is the thing to read: most of the good of it is in the notes and documentation. (This matches what he said about Spengler some years ago.) He recognized the comparative slightness and tendentiousness of Jessie L. Weston from the beginning, as well as her ‘poetic suggestiveness’.